Materials, such as narcotics, explosives or currency, and objects, such as weapons or people, are concealed within or behind barriers with the intention that the materials or objects remain undetected by routine or targeted security checks.
Today, scanning devices are well known which use a variety of sensing methods to detect concealed materials and objects. These scanning devices include transmission X-ray imaging systems, Compton scatter-based backscatter imaging systems, chemical sniffing trace detection equipment, thermal imaging camera systems and so on. Such scanning devices may be used alone or in combination to provide a comprehensive level of security. However, such devices tend either to be large and expensive (e.g. transmission X-ray imaging systems) or insensitive to carefully hidden materials (e.g. trace detection equipment and camera systems) which means that their utility is restricted to certain high throughput situations such as sea ports and land borders, airport checkpoints and so on.
Therefore, what is needed is a compact, light-weight, portable and hand-held system or device that can be maneuvered to reach relatively inaccessible locations and scan behind concealing barriers that are otherwise opaque against chemical and optical probes. Such a system or device should be able to provide immediate feedback if a suspicious material, object or anomaly is detected and should allow an operator to obtain information about the concealed material or object, for threat resolution, without the need to breach the concealing barrier.